I'm looking for your opinion and experience in plant phenotyping. Which plant species is the one that has most importance in phenotypic analyses? Since you work in phenotyping, which species do you work on, and why did you select that particular species?
I normally choose species that have some economic importance. Unfortunatley handling and genetics of many economicallly important species is complex such as upland cotton (4x=52), wheat (6x=42), potato (4x=40), sunflower (2x=34), sugarcane (8x=150), okra (x= 130) forages such as lucerne (4x) and berseem (4x).
In order to study some genetical principles we may choose drosophilla, arabidopsis thaliana or even maize. These species are easier to rare and have simple genomes.
I would like to suggest Brassica oleracea. It has a tremendous amount of phenotypic variation, so you have a substantial response variable.
Much of the variation exists among commercial F1 hybrids, so you can obtain unlimited numbers of genetically identical plants for relatively little money (typically US$5-10/1000 seeds). A lot of phenotyping has already been done on the commercially available genotypes, so you can select those with variation that is of interest to you.
The phenotypic variation has a lot of commercial value. Big differences, such as the ones between kale, cabbage, kohlrabi and broccoli are completely different market classes. Smaller differences, such as between red and green kale are complementary products within a market class. Finally, development in this species is rather sensitive to day length, temperature and other environmental variables, and there is substantial extant phenotypic variation in these traits that there are varieties that are precisely tailored to many different growing areas.
If you can invest in new populations to phenotype, it is relatively easy to make new populations by crossing. To make the genetics easier, you could produce double haploid lines for the parents, and then create double-haploid lines to immortalize the segregating progeny.
There is one risk worth avoiding. While B. oleracea is in a relatively close taxonomic relationship with Arabidopsis, the predictive value of Arabidopsis gene function is often overestimated.
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Hi Marcus,
The question may be already wrong or not clear at least. If I am a broccoli breeder, then broccoli is the most important species. Another criterion (as already indicated above) could be the most important crops (i.e. wheat, rice, based on FAO) or yert another one, the crop which has been used mostly so far in a survey on all phenotyping efforts. Hope this helps despite my negative start ...
best wishes,
Tony
Hi Anton, you are right, the choice of the word "important" probably was not the best. I was looking for those plants that are worked on frequently, and those for wich phenotyping solutions are most needed. With the aim of further developing and improving phenotyping methods and technology, I'm looking for needs of people working in the phenotyping community. Best wishes, Marcus
In my opinion the commercial crop like cotton is worth pursuing for phenotyping especially trait like drought tolerance which has tremendous implications in years to come in semi-arid tropics with changing climate. Though, drought tolerance is not one single pathway in single plant and needs do a lot of field testing.
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